Using 2001 data, Harvard studied 2000 geographical units in the United States, and found that Baltimore City, Maryland, had the lowest life expectancy in the state at 68.6 years, and the lowest for any major urban center nationally. In the wealthier Montgomery County of Maryland, life expectancy is 81.3 yearsalmost 13 more years.

In the Fall of 2005, economist Lyndon LaRouche commissioned a study of what he called "the Baltimore Blob" to examine the dynamic interaction of industrial collapse and poverty, disease, drug abuse, incarceration, the break-up of the family unit in a deindustrialized area, and inadequate housing, that led to a mortality rate of up to 400% above the norm. LaRouche commented, that this higher death rate, directly the result of the "post industrial" policy of the synarchist bankers, would prove to be the case in many formerly industrialized cities that have witnessed the destruction of their manufacturing-based economies. LaRouche also said that this "Death Zone' dynamic was analogous to the high mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa, although not on the same scale.

According to the Harvard study, life expectancy in Baltimore fell from 64.6 years to 63.2 between 1980 and 1990, which corresponded to the wipe-out of Baltimore's industrial base. The increase in life expectancy over the last decade or so, is probably the result of the increase of gentrification by affluent baby-boomers and tweeners, relative to the whole city population, which has been shrinking every year for decades. The study also finds, rather shockingly, that black inner-city men, once they reach their forties, "have a mortality risk similar to that of West Africans." This proves LaRouche's assertion of the similarities of dynamics among poor black populations in America, and conditions in countries like Nigeria, West Africa.